Your clients aren’t in your cult

Believing your own story is easy. Winning work takes more.

Quick fixes have shifted to LinkedIn now. Earn a 7-figure salary after doing this course. Motivational quotes preach transformation in six words or less. CEOs video themselves sobbing after firing someone. Cat memes distil workplace pain like no other non-human can.

This is the dopamine economy. Professional conversation now favours fast, feel-good hits over deeper, messier dialogue.

Meanwhile, in the real world ...

Work life, unfortunately, doesn’t thrive like that. It’s harder, uncomfortable and full of contradictions.

Take my profession, bid and tender management. Despite being all about helping organisations win work, it’s still defined by old content, last-minute scrambles, and crossed fingers. Strategy, planning and forethought are nice in theory, yet rare in practice.

Bid professionals are some of the most competitive people you’ll meet. They might not strut or shout, but they’re wired to win. They live for results.

Shared goals. Separate universes.

This is what baffles me.

• Organisations want to win work, whether to grow, to keep their best clients, to hit strategic targets.

• Bid pros want to win work too, also to grow, to work and collaborate with sharp teams, be part of something interesting and exciting, to learn.

Sounds like a match made in heaven. Except … it’s not.

What’s going wrong?

Belief is not a strategy

Here’s a theory: Workplaces operate a bit like cults, with that mindset being the slow-burn version of the dopamine hit, believing what feels good over what actually works.

A cult, broadly defined, is a group bound by strong internal controls and shared beliefs, sometimes at the expense of critical thinking or individual wellbeing. Sound about right?

If you work at a bank and feel reasonably engaged, you probably believe your bank is the best bank of all the banks. That’s how it’s set up. CEO emails, team meetings, internal comms are all there to reinforce that belief. That in itself is not sinister. It’s just how organisational culture works – it builds cohesion and keeps people aligned.

When it comes to bidding though, that mindset can backfire.

Because your clients aren’t in your cult.

They don’t speak your internal language. They don’t care about your slogans. They’re not convinced just because you are.

We all intrinsically know this. Yet, bid conversations often fall back on internal clichés.

Ask, “Why will we win?” and the answer is usually something like “Because we know the client,” or “Because we’ve got the experience.”

Push a little harder “Ok, so what makes us the best?” and suddenly the room is silent. Can’t we just get on with it? Answer the questions, write nice words, format so it looks pretty.

People are busy. Outlook calendars are filled with a sea of meetings. More deadlines need to be met. Heck, we’ve got three-day-old emails to reply to. Teams calls to make.

What good bid pros actually do

That’s the cult thinking at play. We confuse internal belief with external proof. We forget that clients have their own priorities, pressures and preferences. Some they’ll share and some they won’t. Winning isn’t about repeating the company line louder or longer. It’s about breaking out of it.

It takes work reframing assumptions, asking harder questions, and building arguments rooted in the client’s reality, not just our own. And that’s where good bid professionals shine. They’re not just wordsmiths. They’re competitors, investigators, strategists. Their edge lies in their ability to step outside the groupthink, interrogate the internal story, and find the real “why us” that holds up in the client’s world.

Less Kool-Aid, more strategy

Understanding what matters to the client isn’t guesswork. It’s a discipline. The best teams know this. They don’t just echo internal messages, they interrogate them.

So ask yourself: are our beliefs helping us win, or holding us back?